Warlick sites

I decided to check out a couple of really interesting sites. The first, called the Kids Club proved to be quite cute. It is a site created and maintained by librarians. How cool is that? When I read that on the web site page it reminded me or a post that Staci made previously in which she talked about what a rich and valuable resource a medial specialist is within a school district. She commented that this person should be your friend, well in this case the Kids Club web site should be more than your friend, it should also be your middle school students friend as well.

The site was marked for grades K-7 (or kids and teens) and featured links that would take kids to help links that showed them how to search from the site, special search tools that were available to them, and searches for pictures and sound. I love the ideal that all kinds of media is available through this one website and that it is maintained by librarians, it's almost like suggesting that kids utilizing this site are in a "safe zone". With 15 main topics and plenty of related links listed under each it's clear that technology is only a click or two away for students. I saw the site as a great way to give middle school students a starting off point for all kinds of projects. With the integration of several types of media students should have a great time creating blogs and/or web pages that could be added safely with information obtained through this site.

I did notice that there was an option for people to submit website urls for consideration. There were also a list of guidelines for people to make sure that the site they were recommending fell within them. I love the ideal that these sites are checked and verified prior to allowing them to be included in the listing. What I also found rather interesting was a small link found at the bottom of the page that encouraged visitors to click onto it in order that they might see how the page would look to a librarian. I, of course, had to give it a try. What I saw was the Dewey Decimal System - way cool - and it also advised students to go ahead and reclick the link to get back to the original page!

I also decided to take a look the bookmarking/search engine website called backflip and believe me I was almost doing backflips when I saw it, since it is one way cool site. I can already see uses for implementing it within a 21st Century Classroom! This site has the ability to not only allow the user to gain access to their own bookmarks on any computer, but it allows the user to do a search of all the contents within their book mark collection, rather than just a search of the pages saved. This would be a useful tool for those students working on research projects, or other types of essays. It would also help students when creating a works cited page. Being able to access all the pages on a particular topic just by doing a search of your bookmarked items through backflip is a really awesome tool. I was also impressed with the links to newsarticles about backflip on their own website. The articles hinted at other features that could evolve in the months to come and would offer users more opportunities for downloading or uploading. Way cool. It's kinda bit like reading Warlick and Friedman all over again!